It's good to see that some other people hold similar views to me about the Symantec acquisition of MessageLabs, see the similary titled article on internetnews.com. Also David Ferris of Ferris Research (specialist messaging analyst) says that MessageLabs technology is "no longer leading edge."

There's no denying that MessageLabs have a good core service, but they've made some questionable roadmap decisions, buying OmniPod a proprietary IM platform, and OEM'img archiving from Fortiva and business continuity from MessageOne. Yes it's true that we (Cleartext) OEM our core platform, but at least that is a single unified true SaaS platform.

Both of these are good solutions in their own right, but why buy when these types of solutions are relatively simple to build, after all they are 'just' email/data managment systems, far simpler to build than their core anti-spam and anti-virus services.